Jeff McMahan

Killing, letting die, and withdrawing aid.

One of the aims of this article is to contribute to the identification of the empirical criteria governing the use of the concepts of killing and letting die. I will not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the concepts but will limit the inquiry to certain problematic cases -- namely, cases involving the removal or withdrawal of life-supporting aid or protection. The analysis of these cases will, however, shed light on the criteria for distinguishing killing and letting die in other cases as well. My overall aims in the article are partly constructive and partly skeptical. I hope to advance our understanding of the nature of the distinction between killing and letting die. This, I believe, will enable us to defend the moral relevance of the distinction against certain objections -- in particular, objections that claim that the distinction fails to coincide with commonsense moral intuitions. Yet I will suggest that, as we get clearer about the nature of the distinction and the sources of its intuitive appeal, it may seem that the intuitions it supports are not so well grounded as one could wish.

Death and the Value of Life

The Epicurean argument that death cannot be a misfortune for the person who dies because, when death occurs, there is no longer a person to whom any misfortune can befall, fails to establish the conclusions which its defenders have sought from it. Beginning with the premise that death can be bad, either for the victim or in quasi-impersonal terms, the author seeks to define that badness through philosophical analysis. The belief that to have more life than is worth living is always better than to have less is reconciled with the notion that the badness of death increases with the degree of psychological connectedness, using the examples of the deaths of an unborn fetus and of a 35-year-old woman. The author contends it can be better for a person to suffer a worse death at 35 than never to have lived at all.

Asymmetries in the Morality of Causing People to Exist

This paper questions the justification for the common view that there is a moral reason not to cause a person to exist if his life would be miserable, but no reason to cause a person to exist because his life would be worth living. It argues that this asymmetry presupposes an ad hoc claim about the different ways in which good and bad states in an individual’s life have value. The claim that there is a moral difference between harming and benefiting is more plausible but supports only a weaker asymmetry that concedes that there is a moral reason to create lives worth living.

Causing Disabled People to Exist and Causing People to Be Disabled

Attempts to determine or to select what kind of person or people to bring into existence are controversial. This is particularly true of “negative selection” or “selecting against” a certain type of person—that is, the attempt to prevent a person of a certain type, or people of that type, from existing. Virtually everyone agrees that some instances of negative selection are objectionable—for example, that selection against healthy people would be wrong, particularly if this were combined with positive selection of people with serious diseases. But some people believe that all negative selection is objectionable and therefore that all “selection for existence,” whether positive or negative, is objectionable. For if negative selection is objectionable, it seems to follow that positive selection is as well, since the attempt to bring a person of a certain type into existence is simultaneously an attempt not to bring into existence a person who is not of that type. In short, positive selection is implicitly negative as well. Why would someone believe that, for example, the attempt to avoid having a child with Tay-Sachs disease is objectionable? The reasons given vary but usually appeal to the idea that to decide that certain people ought not to exist is to discriminate against people of a certain type on the basis of values that are contested or not universally valid. I will not discuss the view that all selection is wrong, which is in any case the view of only a small minority. Most people believe that some forms of se-

An alternative to brain death.

This article criticizes a range of assumptions that proponents of brain death usually share. It argues that one of the main contentions made in defense of brain death – that the brain is necessary for integrated functioning in a human organism – is mistaken. It then sketches an alternative account of human death that distinguishes between the biological death of a human organism and the death or ceasing to exist of a person.

Cloning, killing, and identity.

One potentially valuable use of cloning is to provide a source of tissues or organs for transplantation. The most important objection to this use of cloning is that a human clone would be the sort of entity that it would be seriously wrong to kill. I argue that entities of the sort that you and I essentially are do not begin to exist until around the seventh month of fetal gestation. Therefore to kill a clone prior to that would not be to kill someone like you or me but would be only to prevent one of us from existing. And even after one of us begins to exist, the objections to killing it remain comparatively weak until its psychological capacities reach a certain level of maturation. These claims support the permissibility of killing a clone during the early stages of its development in order to use its organs for transplantation.

Animalism and the varieties of conjoined twinning.

We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning: dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.

Eating animals the nice way

Dædalus Winter 2008 Many people are opposed to factory farming because of the terrible suffering it inflicts on animals, yet see no objection to eating animals that are killed painlessly after having been reared in conditions that are at least no worse, and are perhaps even better, than typical conditions in the wild. Let us refer to this latter practice, in which animals are reared for human consumption but in humane conditions, as ‘benign carnivorism.’ When philosophers discuss the morality of this practice, they sometimes argue that, unlike animals killed by hunters, animals that are raised to be killed and eaten would never have existed if we had not created them in order to eat them. If benign carnivorism enables these animals to have contented lives that they would otherwise not have had, it seems better for the animals as well as for the people who get to eat them. How, then, could such a practice be objectionable? Those who object to eating factoryfarmed animals but accept benign carnivorism generally believe that while animal suffering matters, animal lives do not –or at least not as much. They think that there is a strong moral reason not to cause animals to suffer, and even to try to prevent them from suffering, but not a comparably strong reason not to kill them, or to ensure that they have longer rather than shorter lives. One possible basis for this view is the difference between how well off and how badly off it is possible for animals to be. Although animals are incapable of the depths of psychological misery to which most human beings are susceptible, their capacity for physical suffering rivals our own. Yet their highest peaks of well-being are signi1⁄2cantly lower than those accessible to most human beings. While some animals–dogs, for instance –experience exuberant joy more readily and frequently than many adult human beings do, animals lack other dimensions of well-being that are arguably more important, such as achievement, creativity, deep personal relations, knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, and so on. There is another, possibly even more important, reason why animal lives matter less than animal suffering. Not only do animals’ future lives promise less in terms of both quality and quantity of Jeff McMahan is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and author of “The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life” (2002).

Paradoxes of Abortion and Prenatal Injury

Many people who believe that abortion may often be justified by appeal to the pregnant woman’s interests also believe that a woman’s infliction of significant but nonlethal injury on her fetus can seldom be justified by appeal to her interests. Yet the second of these beliefs can seem to cast doubt on the first. For the view that the infliction of prenatal injury is seriously morally objectionable may seem to presuppose a view about the status of the fetus that challenges the permissibility of abortion. The fear of being interpreted as implicitly endorsing such a view has thus led some defenders of abortion to be reluctant for tactical reasons to condemn the infliction of prenatal injury. In this they are encouraged by those who exploit the issue of prenatal injury in their campaign against abortion. When, for example, the House and Senate in 2004 passed legislation recognizing two victims of an assault against a pregnant woman, many viewed this as a tactic in a larger strategy to restrict access to abortion. This tactic is potentially effective. For people may find it compelling to infer that, if injuring a fetus is seriously objectionable, abortion must be even more objectionable, since killing is normally more seriously objectionable than merely injuring. That it is common for people to believe—at least initially—that prenatal injury is worse than abortion may be obscured by the way prenatal injury has been treated in the law. Legislation that would hold pregnant women criminally liable for culpably inflicted prenatal injury

Collectivist Defenses of the Moral Equality of Combatants

Abstract This article examines the view that the doctrine of the moral equality of combatants can be defended by appeal to a collectivist understanding of war, according to which individual combatants on both sides act not in their capacity as individuals but as agents of their collective. I argue that the collectivist argument fails and, moreover, cannot be salvaged by an appeal to the epistemic limitations under which combatants must usually act. Considerations of moral risk in fact suggest that epistemic limitations militate in favor of refusal rather than obedience.